this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

ATSC 3.0 is just a scheme to turn free, over the air TV into another cable. Ever increasing prices.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

It's certainly beginning to look that way. DRM ruins everything.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

live broadcasts of video without requiring wireless networks.

Do the writers know what a broadcast is and what wireless means?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean... it's not a network technically. it's a broadcast station (though the stations themselves are networks)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It still requires being in range of a (network of) wireless transmitter(s). I'd have written 'without mobile networks' or 'cellular networks' or 'data connection' or 'IP networks' as it's a broadcast and not a two-way communication.

Sure, it's nitpicking and they're technically correct but it's also imprecise wording. It's still wireless transmissions and not magic.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. Why do they even want this technology on all phones?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I haven't been following the issue, but:

The government believes mandating ATSC 3.0 in smartphones will help bring down network congestion in wireless networks.

So, over-the-air television uses broadcasting. You broadcast one signal, everyone in the area can receive it. You can have one viewer or a million viewers and it takes the same amount of bandwidth.

But if everyone is streaming video unicast, the way they typically would over the Internet from somewhere like YouTube -- which has the benefit of letting people watch whatever they want, whenever they want, independent of anyone else, you can't do that; you can't have a million viewers in a cell, or anything approaching that, because bandwidth consumption scales linearly with the number of viewers.

I know that the US emergency alert system uses broadcasting over the cell network, so there has to be at least limited support for broadcasting in the cell network, though. I dunno if cell providers use it for pushing out system updates to phones, but if they don't, I suspect that they should.

googles

https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2022/12/multicast-broadcast-group-communication

5G multicast-broadcast for group communication: Why it matters and how it works

Through 5G NR multicast-broadcast functionality, 5G networks can now be equipped to support efficient, reliable and scalable group communication services. Below, we explore the 3GPP technologies bringing high-performance connectivity to mission critical use cases.

It sounds like there is some kind of way to do broadcast/multicast within 5G, though.